The position has fitted it and its suc

HE position of Palestine on the map

cessive peoples for a remarkable place in history. Here is a little country, with only eight thousand square miles, or two thousand less than our State of Vermont, | which, if we measure it by the scope of its history, the remote antiquity of its literature, and the great forces it has started into irresistible movement, we must place among the foremost in the ancient family of nations. It is practically the meetingplace of three continents-Africa, Asia, and Europe. If Belgium is the cock

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pit of Europe," where many of the chie battles of modern times have ough Palestine holds the same ancient world. Her pla has been the battle-grou civilizations from Abr poleon Bonaparte's. was the pathway of while on the sea which planted

THOMSON, D.D.

thage, rival of

an early day came into relations with Syria that we get something of a definite knowledge of that great Oriental power. We find Rawlinson, in his Five Monarchies, and Wilkinson, in his Manners and Customs of the Egyptians, constantly appealing to and leaning on the Scripture history, in order to treat the subject in hand in consecutive form. It is Palestine that brings all great ancient countries within our vision. It is our best telescope for a view of the remote past. We read the fortunes of other peoples through her. Of right she did not possess the Greek language. It was foisted upon her through Alexander's conquest, and yet so carefully did she learn the new tongue that it became the receptacle for the new faith from Him of Nazareth, and the medium of its communication to the remotest shores known to men. Palestine long resisted Rome, and finally suffered destruction through Titus. Her acres and faith were bartered like a piece of merchandise, and were, in turn, owned by Canaanite, Jew, Assyrian, Greek, Syrian, Maccabean, and Roman. But in three centuries we find Bethlehem supplanting Rome. Christianity held the sceptre on the Seven Hills, and paganism became a thing of the country village, or pagus.

This historical importance of Palestine does not come within the purpose of Dr. Thomson. While he admits this fact, and could have drawn upon his rich experience in the country for abundant illustration, he has aimed to show that the country of which he writes, though now in wretched decline, and broken up many a score of times by the ploughshare of war, can still tell the story of its own varied fortunes. He goes farther than this, and proves that the people who live in the country, and the very surface of the land itself, with the vegetation and animals that exist now, are all witnesses to the exactness and authenticity of the Biblical narrative. The Bible, then, has taken the coloring of the country itself. No other country could have produced it. A stranger drifted ashore at Jaffa, and never inquiring what country he was in, could see from the people and their daily life, and from the fields, and houses of the poor, and humble labors of the husbandman, that he was in the country of the Bible. The first edition of Dr. Thomson's work, in two volumes, is now to give place to a larger one, in three volumes, which ad

heres to the same fundamental thought, but is essentially a new work. It reverses the itinerary of the former edition, and begins with the south country, traverses the entire hill country of Judæa, and concludes with Jerusalem and the environs. In our examination of the volumes we shall make liberal use of the author's own language.

With Jaffa as a starting-point, one of the first things we observe is the system of irrigation. The use of the water-wheel is constant in Egypt, but it was one of the inducements which Moses held out to the Israelites, that if patient and earnest in their journey, they would not need the water-wheel in their new home: "For the land whither thou goest in to possess it is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs." Nothing could be more laborious and tedious than the plying of the little Egyptian water-wheel by the fect. If the whole of the promised land had to be irrigated by such a process, it would require a nation of slaves like the Hebrews, and task-masters like the Egyptians, to make it succeed. The Hebrews had learned by bitter experience what it was to water with the foot, and this would add great force to the allusion, and render doubly precious the goodly land which drank of the rain of heaven, and required no such drudgery to make it fruitful. But the labor of the feet does not cease with getting the water upon the surface of the ground. The farmer or gardener is often compelled to conduct the water about from plant to plant and furrow to furrow by his feet alone. When one place is sufficiently saturated, he pushes aside the soil between it and the next furrow with his foot, and continues to do so until all are watered. is thus sometimes knee-deep in mud, and many diseases are generated by this slavish work. But the people of Palestine, while they do not use the little wheel worked only by the feet, make use of the large and clumsy Persian water-wheel. Hundreds of these are to be seen in the Jaffa region, and to them must be attributed largely the delicious fruit of the gardens and orchards. Simple in construction, cheap, quickly made, soon repaired, easily worked, they raise an immense quantity of water. Many efforts have been made to introduce pumps, but they

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